Me and My Job: After a major accident, patients are often rushed to radiography for an assessment of the damage done. It can be hectic, dramatic, frontline work. Catherine Foley reports

Doors swing open and the drama unfolds. There's great urgency as a radiographer races down a corridor in the dead of night towards the injured parties, after a serious road accident. A porter pushes the patient who has just been brought in on a stretcher to the radiography department.

It can be "hectic" in the radiography department of Beaumont Hospital, says Louise McDermott. She has worked as a radiographer here since last June. It's this hectic, dramatic side to her work that is the one aspect that people sometimes forget, she says.

Radiographers are often at the frontline, says McDermott. "We are involved in trauma situations. We are among the first people in the line. If there's a query about a neck injury in the ER, we have to look at it." If surgery is required - of the neck, chest or abdomen - X-rays will have to be taken. In ER, radiography, like everything else, "is usually quite rushed".

"We have our moments," says McDermott, laughing. "Then we have the whole theatre aspect as well, which is such a closed environment. We would go up with a portable X-ray machine."

McDermott's hours vary quite a lot also. There are night shifts, early morning starts and late evenings too. She wears a white tunic and navy trousers, while green scrubs are donned for theatre. The work is always satisfying, she says. There are more than 50 radiographers in Beaumount's radiography department.

At school radiography "seemed like a good mix of the social side and patient care and the medical, side," she says. "It's quite a good compromise between science and meeting people . . . It really appealed to me."

Today, an increasingly important element of her job is patient care. "If the patient isn't comfortable, they are not co-operative. They don't know what to expect. They don't realise it's going to be easy." Developing a rapport with them is "a huge part of the job", she says.

"People are under a lot of stress. They can be aggressive when they wouldn't normally be. You really notice what state of mind they are in." It is also possible to get to know patients.

After her Leaving Cert in 1996 in the Carmelite College in Moate, Co Westmeath, she went to UCD to study diagnostic radiography, which is a four-year course. There were 22 in the original class, mainly girls, she says, with about one-third boys.

In first year they spent a day a week in one of Dublin's teaching hospitals on clinical placement learning from the radiographers.

"You're picking up little bits of information all the time, ways to interact with people - you get used to chatting away to people, who are usually there for 15 minutes or so," though sometimes it can be longer. People are usually nervous. "They don't really know what it's going to be like. It can be quite a threatening environment."

The course was "quite tough", she says. During the four years, students had to spend three days a week in an X-ray department and a week at Easter.

Her final-year dissertation, which involved primary research, looked at the use of ultrasound during breast screening "to see would it be capable of reducing the number of biopsies which are done because many of them are benign," she says. She was awarded first-class honours for the dissertation. She interviewed two radiographers and an ultra-sound specialist.

For future radiographers, she says "you have to be organised, especially in on-call situations. You have to do the paper work. Also you have to prioritise patients for the night. You have to decide whose worse off - who needs the X-ray.

"You have to be fairly versatile and practical. You could be working in several different areas. You have to adapt and look at different situations. You have to be fairly sociable to be able to make people feel comfortable."

It can be heavy work too "if there's no porter to help", but radiographers are "trained in manual handling".

Sometimes in the ER between 3 and 4 a.m. "it can quieten down a lot," she says. "We have a small bedroom to go so we can snatch a few winks." There is time to chat to patients. There is time to get to know them, she says. It's part of what makes the job so worthwhile. Then her bleeper goes again and it's action stations in the ER.